Slideshow task, need opinion.

It's close to graduation and the school what's to present a slideshow of all graduating year 12 students (about 100 people). I have been assigned this task and I really what to do a good job as it will be seen i by our school community of about 1000 people.

Therefore I would really love to do a professional looking slideshow keeping in mind that I need to to display faces of students. What app should I use? I've got access to Powerpoint, iPhoto and Keynote. I was thinking of using the cube effect of iPhoto, but I'm not sure it would be to great.

The teacher would like it if I could display a slide with many people's faces on it and that it perhaps switchs. I'm guessing like the iTunes album art screen saver.

Basically what app and setting out do you think I should be going about doing this slideshow. Thanks for your suggestions.

If you are going to use a Mac, I would say go with Keynote. It has much cooler effects than PowerPoint.

However, if you are going to transfer it to a PC to present it, then go with PowerPoint. The PC con't play keynote files without a lot of work.

iPhoto can out put a QuickTime file that will play on PC or Mac, but you need QuickTime Pro to play it full screen. I have had problems doing it this way. Some of the images were left out of the final movie.

I would use iMovie. You can use the Ken Burns effects to make the photos move (although I find it tiresome) add a sound track and output to a DVD (if you have a DVD burner)( and sell copies...) If no DVD burner you're back to needing QuickTime Pro to run if full screen. Be sure to output at the highest resolution.

-You wouldn't need Quicktime pro to run a Quicktime movie full-screen- you could just use VLC. (free)

- I got much worse results trying to build a photo slideshow in iMovie than iPhoto- the outputted file looked pretty crappy.

- You could probably get away with doing everything you need right in iPhoto, and really quickly, with music, etc... and it would be even better if you could just run it right off of iMovie instead of exporting it. (You can go full screen, no quality loss, loop option...)

- Your options in Keynote and Powerpoint are even more limited, and the result is probably going to be pretty boring.

- If you had the skills, you could use Flash to build this, and have a lot more control of everything. Then you could export projectors and .exes for whatever platform and have them run full screen.

-You wouldn't need Quicktime pro to run a Quicktime movie full-screen- you could just use VLC. (free)

- I got much worse results trying to build a photo slideshow in iMovie than iPhoto- the outputted file looked pretty crappy.

- You could probably get away with doing everything you need right in iPhoto, and really quickly, with music, etc... and it would be even better if you could just run it right off of iMovie instead of exporting it. (You can go full screen, no quality loss, loop option...)

- Your options in Keynote and Powerpoint are even more limited, and the result is probably going to be pretty boring.

- If you had the skills, you could use Flash to build this, and have a lot more control of everything. Then you could export projectors and .exes for whatever platform and have them run full screen.

I've never had any trouble with an output in iMovie. I make photo montages for Wedding Rehearsals all the time with it and output to DVD with no problem. If you are making a low resolution output and run it full screen on a high resolution monitor, yea it's going to look bad. Remeber, iMovie is for TV video...640x480 (I know, now it does HD if you have the machine to run it.)

I haven't tried doing a LONG slide show in iPhoto since Version 3. It would only let you use one song. I need several music tracks. I use iMovie and/or Final Cut Pro to blend the tracks and match the photo timing to the music.

As for Ken Burns, the automatic settings never works perfect on every photo imported. Smething or someone always gets cut off. I would rather turn it off before inserting the photos and then choose which photos will have it manually. I jsut discovered a couple of weeks ago that you can move the photos around to choose the beginning and end points of the movements.

As for the Cube effect, it's cool a time or two, but not for E V E R Y transition.

Flash...you are on your own. To much for me to tackle. I can slap together a video slideshow with transitions in 10 minutes and then start rending the output. Time is money.

I might give iMovie a go or just use Powerpoint. Ill wait until I receive the photo's and see which one works best and is not so time consuming as I'm at the end of the semester and have a ton of exams to go through as well.

My wife and I do a lot of these - both at her shool and as part of our video production business.

Thing one: forget PowerPoint, it's a P.O.S. as compared with any of the options.

Deluxe Method: Scan and manicure all photos in Photoshop, then import into FCP and build the montage in the timeline. This allows you to apply all kinds of effects and really "finish" the production. You can precisely animate the photos ala Ken Burns, add filters & transitions, composite, all kinds of stuff. One thing we do frequently is animate within a photo by creating an alpha channel image to provide the movement and compositing it, then keyframing the motion. Integration of any video is a snap.

MacRumors attracts a broad audience
of both consumers and professionals interested in
the latest technologies and products. We also boast an active community focused on
purchasing decisions and technical aspects of the iPhone, iPod, iPad, and Mac platforms.